


Enough

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My first-ever POI fanfic, archived here for posterity! *sniff* Ah, the world was so simple then... </p><p>Finch genfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

“He's safe, Finch. Back with his daughters.”  
  
“Good work, Mr. Reese,” the man called Finch answered, a smile on his lips. He wondered if Reese, spy extraordinaire, could hear it in his tone.   
  
Reese was smiling. Finch didn't need to hear it; he could see it, the little traffic camera ten feet away from Reese being temporarily diverted for his own purposes.   
  
“And good night, too. I'll call you when we have another number.”  
  
On the screen, Reese opened his mouth to reply, but Finch had already ended the call. He watched the expressions flickering over Reese's face, the flicker of irritation at realizing he'd been hung up on, the resigned quirk of his lips and the small headshake as the tall man pocketed the cellphone. John Reese turned up his coat's collar, gave the house of the man he'd rescued one last once-over, and turned to disappear into the night.  
  
Finch could follow him-- with the cameras-- could segue from feed to feed down the block as he'd done in the first few weeks of their working relationship, when 'trust' had still been only a concept, when he'd needed to _know_ exactly what Reese was doing, where he was going, staying, who he was talking to, if he was being followed, if he was following anyone...   
  
That had been then. This was now. He let Reese walk out of the grainy feed's view range and didn't tap the keys to bring up any of the other cameras.   
  
Instead Finch opened a drawer in his desk and took out a yellow legal notepad, a gluestick, a pair of scissors.   
  
His desk was awash in paperwork from the Number Reese had just saved. Finch grunted to himself, a small noise, contented, as he snipped out the printout of Juan Alvarez's driver's license photo. He flipped through the pages, each covered with little glued-in photos and his own small, meticulous script, until he reached a blank space.  
  
It was silly. He knew it. To keep... well... a scrapbook of the ones they saved.   
  
But the board was still there, the record of all the failures, and after Theresa Whitaker Finch had done something he hadn't done in two years, not since Nathan, not since-- everything.  
  
He had cut himself a little slack.  
  
Permission to celebrate, even if that celebration had involved nothing more than a hastily scrawled note on the first paper he had had at hand-- the yellow pad-- _Did it. The girl's safe. Mr. Reese and I did it._  
  
There'd been Wheeler already, yes. But Wheeler had been a face on a screen, Wheeler had been a tangle of their mistakes, of having the wrong person until it was nearly too late-- Wheeler hadn't been in a hotel room with Finch for long hours, Wheeler hadn't stared at him with terror and jaded loneliness and then reluctant trust and Wheeler hadn't given up the one chance to get away to safety in order to turn and draw her small, hopeless razor as if _she_ were going to defend _him_.  
  
Wheeler hadn't been real to him.  
  
Theresa made it real. Theresa made it, for the first time in a long time, worth it.  
  
He'd written down the date. Fiercely underlined the 'did it' again, his fingers shaking a little. The board was still there-- the board, with its litany of his failures, his guilt, his uselessness-- but he had a name on yellow paper and it was a start.  
  
Months ago now. The yellow pad had several names in it now, and pictures, although Finch was too much the logical pragmatist to believe that this did anything like even the scales. No. There were still more names on the board than on the pad, and the board was just New York.   
  
Sometimes he wondered what Reese would do if he ever told him about the others. The Machine didn't confine its attentions to New York City; it gathered information nationally-- internationally.  
  
A murder occurs in the United States roughly every half hour. Some half of these are premeditated.  
  
Before Reese he hadn't been able to save any of the Numbers who'd been in the same _city_ as him, let alone the ones occurring every hour, a thousand miles away.   
  
Even with Reese's help, Finch knew that New York was, realistically, the most they could possibly hope for. It was far and away the best surveilled of the major American cities, with the information infrastructure firmly in place. The idea of trying to gather intelligence for Reese in the middle of Iowa, where there were more cornstalks than cameras, would have made Finch smile if not for the knowledge that, yes, people died in Iowa. People died in Florida, in Texas, in Nevada, and in the rest of the world too, a hundred strangers every day.   
  
Finch couldn't save them all. If he had an army of Reeses he still couldn't save them all.  
  
Harold Finch shook himself from these thoughts and rotated the glue stick until he had enough to paste Alvarez's picture to the yellow paper.  
  
He wrote the date. He wrote Alvarez's name, in his careful meticulous script, and the names and ages of his daughters. And then he turned to the first page, to Theresa's entry, and read through each name, the list of their families as well. Here was the judge-- here was the construction worker--  
  
They couldn't save them all.  
  
But they'd saved some.  
  
And on nights like this, with the rain coming down on the city outside but his library office was warm, comfortable-- a mug of green tea sitting by his elbow-- Theresa smiling from the yellow paper out at the world, a young woman who had returned from the world of the dead to the living, to having a future, to having hope--  
  
\--on nights like this, it was enough.


End file.
